“I had a talk with my _mam’selle_ while we were dancing,” said the
medico when all three came into the street. “The subject was her first
love. _He_ was a bookkeeper in Smolensk with a wife and five children.
She was seventeen and lived with her pa and ma who kept a soap and
candle shop.”
“How did he conquer her heart?” asked Vassiliev.
“He bought her fifty roubles’-worth of underclothes--Lord knows what!”
“However could he get her love-story out of his girl?” thought
Vassiliev. “I can’t. My dear chaps, I’m off home,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know how to get on here. I’m bored and disgusted. What
is there amusing about it? If they were only human beings; but they’re
savages and beasts. I’m going, please.”
“Grisha darling, please,” the painter said with a sob in his voice,
pressing close to Vassiliev, “let’s go to one more--then to Hell with
them. Do come, Grigor.”
They prevailed on Vassiliev and led him up a staircase. The carpet and
the gilded balustrade, the porter who opened the door, the panels which
decorated the hall, were still in the same S----v Street style, but
here it was perfected and imposing.
“Really I’m going home,” said Vassiliev, taking off his overcoat.
“Darling, please, please,” said the painter and kissed him on the neck.
“Don’t be so faddy, Grigri--be a pal. Together we came, together we go.
What a beast you are though!”
“I can wait for you in the street. My God, it’s disgusting here.”
“Please, please.... You just look on, see, just look on.”
“One should look at things objectively,” said the medico seriously.
Vassiliev entered the salon and sat down. There were many more guests
besides him and his friends: two infantry officers, a grey, bald-headed
gentleman with gold spectacles, two young clean-shaven men from the
Surveyors’ Institute, and a very drunk man with an actor’s face.
All the girls were looking after these guests and took no notice of
Vassiliev. Only one of them dressed like Aïda glanced at him sideways,
smiled at something and said with a yawn:
“So the dark one’s come.”
Vassiliev’s heart was beating and his face was burning. He felt
ashamed for being there, disgusted and tormented. He was tortured by
the thought that he, a decent and affectionate man (so he considered
himself up till now), despised these women and felt nothing towards
them but repulsion. He could not feel pity for them or for the
musicians or the lackeys.
“It’s because I don’t try to understand them,” he thought. “They’re all
more like beasts than human beings; but all the same they are human
beings. They’ve got souls. One should understand them first, then judge
them.”
“Grisha, don’t go away. Wait for us,” called the painter; and he
disappeared somewhere.
Soon the medico disappeared also.
“Yes, one should try to understand. It’s no good, otherwise,” thought
Vassiliev, and he began to examine intently the face of each girl,
looking for the guilty smile. But whether he could not read faces or
because none of these women felt guilty he saw in each face only a dull
look of common, vulgar boredom and satiety. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles,
harsh, stupid voices, impudent gestures--and nothing else. Evidently
every woman had in her past a love romance with a bookkeeper and fifty
roubles’-worth of underclothes. And in the present the only good things
in life were coffee, a three-course dinner, wine, quadrilles, and
sleeping till two in the afternoon....
Finding not one guilty smile, Vassiliev began to examine them to see
if even one looked clever and his attention was arrested by one pale,
rather tired face. It was that of a dark woman no longer young, wearing
a dress scattered with spangles. She sat in a chair staring at the
floor and thinking of something. Vassiliev paced up and down and then
sat down beside her as if by accident.
“One must begin with something trivial,” he thought, “and gradually
pass on to serious conversation....”
“What a beautiful little dress you have on,” he said, and touched the
gold fringe of her scarf with his finger.
“It’s all right,” said the dark woman.
“Where do you come from?”
“I? A long way. From Tchernigov.”
“It’s a nice part.”
“It always is, where you don’t happen to be.”
“What a pity I can’t describe nature,” thought Vassiliev. “I’d move her
by descriptions of Tchernigov. She must love it if she was born there.”
“Do you feel lonely here?” he asked.
“Of course I’m lonely.”
“Why don’t you go away from here, if you’re lonely?”
“Where shall I go to? Start begging, eh?”
“It’s easier to beg than to live here.”
“Where did you get that idea? Have you been a beggar?”
“I begged, when I hadn’t enough to pay my university fees; and even if
I hadn’t begged it’s easy enough to understand. A beggar is a free man,
at any rate, and you’re a slave.”
The dark woman stretched herself, and followed with sleepy eyes the
lackey who carried a tray of glasses and soda-water.
“Stand us a champagne,” she said, and yawned again.
“Champagne,” said Vassiliev. “What would happen if your mother or your
brother suddenly came in? What would you say? And what would they say?
You would say ‘champagne’ then.”
Suddenly the noise of crying was heard. From the next room where the
lackey had carried the soda-water, a fair man rushed out with a red
face and angry eyes. He was followed by the tall, stout madame, who
screamed in a squeaky voice:
“No one gave you permission to slap the girls in the face. Better class
than you come here, and never slap a girl. You bounder!”
Followed an uproar. Vassiliev was scared and went white. In the next
room some one wept, sobbing, sincerely, as only the insulted weep.
And he understood that indeed human beings lived here, actually
human beings, who get offended, suffer, weep, and ask for help. The
smouldering hatred, the feeling of repulsion, gave way to an acute
sense of pity and anger against the wrong-doer. He rushed into the
room from which the weeping came. Through the rows of bottles which
stood on the marble table-top he saw a suffering tear-stained face,
stretched out his hands towards this face, stepped to the table and
instantly gave a leap back in terror. The sobbing woman was dead-drunk.
As he made his way through the noisy crowd, gathered round the fair
man, his heart failed him, he lost his courage like a boy, and it
seemed to him that in this foreign, inconceivable world, they wanted to
run after him, to beat him, to abuse him with foul words. He tore down
his coat from the peg and rushed headlong down the stairs.
V
Pressing close to the fence, he stood near to the house and waited
for his friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and fiddles,
gay, bold, impudent and sad, mingled into chaos in the air, and this
confusion was, as before, as if an unseen orchestra were tuning in the
dark over the roof-tops. If he looked up towards the darkness, then
all the background was scattered with white, moving points: it was
snowing. The flakes, coming into the light, spun lazily in the air like
feathers, and still more lazily fell. Flakes of snow crowded whirling
about Vassiliev, and hung on his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows.
The cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by, all were white.
“How dare the snow fall in this street?” thought Vassiliev. “A curse on
these houses.”
Because of his headlong rush down the staircase his feet failed him
from weariness; he was out of breath as if he had climbed a mountain.
His heart beat so loud that he could hear it. A longing came over him
to get out of this street as soon as possible and go home; but still
stronger was his desire to wait for his friends and to vent upon them
his feeling of heaviness.
He had not understood many things in the houses. The souls of the
perishing women were to him a mystery as before; but it was dear to
him that the business was much worse than one would have thought. If
the guilty woman who poisoned herself was called a prostitute, then it
was hard to find a suitable name for all these creatures, who danced
to the muddling music and said long, disgusting phrases. They were not
perishing; they were already done for.
“Vice is here,” he thought; “but there is neither confession of sin
nor hope of salvation. They are bought and sold, drowned in wine
and torpor, and they are dull and indifferent as sheep and do not
understand. My God, my God!”
It was so clear to him that all that which is called human dignity,
individuality, the image and likeness of God, was here dragged down to
the gutter, as they say of drunkards, and that not only the street and
the stupid women were to blame for it.
A crowd of students white with snow, talking and laughing gaily,
passed by. One of them, a tall, thin man, peered into Vassiliev’s face
and said drunkenly, “He’s one of ours. Logged, old man? Aha! my lad.
Never mind. Walk up, never say die, uncle.”
He took Vassiliev by the shoulders and pressed his cold wet moustaches
to his cheek, then slipped, staggered, brandished his arms, and cried
out:
“Steady there--don’t fall.”
Laughing, he ran to join his comrades.
Through the noise the painter’s voice became audible.
“You dare beat women! I won’t have it. Go to Hell. You’re regular
swine.”
The medico appeared at the door of the house. He glanced round and on
seeing Vassiliev, said in alarm:
“Is that you? My God, it’s simply impossible to go anywhere with Yegor.
I can’t understand a chap like that. He kicked up a row--can’t you
hear? Yegor,” he called from the door. “Yegor!”
“I won’t have you hitting women.” The painter’s shrill voice was
audible again from upstairs.
Something heavy and bulky tumbled down the staircase. It was the
painter coming head over heels. He had evidently been thrown out.
He lifted himself up from the ground, dusted his hat, and with an angry
indignant face, shook his fist at the upstairs.
“Scoundrels! Butchers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t have you hitting a weak,
drunken woman. Ah, you....”
“Yegor ... Yegor!” the medico began to implore, “I give my word I’ll
never go out with you again. Upon my honour, I won’t.”
The painter gradually calmed, and the friends went home.
“To these sad shores unknowing”--the medico began--“An unknown power
entices....”
“‘Behold the mill,’” the painter sang with him after a pause, “‘Now fallen
into ruin.’ How the snow is falling, most Holy Mother. Why did you go
away, Grisha? You’re a coward; you’re only an old woman.”
Vassiliev was walking behind his friends. He stared at their backs and
thought: “One of two things: either prostitution only seems to us an
evil and we exaggerate it, or if prostitution is really such an evil as
is commonly thought, these charming friends of mine are just as much
slavers, violators, and murderers as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo
whose photographs appear in ‘The Field.’ They’re singing, laughing,
arguing soundly now, but haven’t they just been exploiting starvation,
ignorance, and stupidity? They have, I saw them at it. Where does their
humanity, their science, and their painting come in, then? The science,
art, and lofty sentiments of these murderers remind me of the lump of
fat in the story. Two robbers killed a beggar in a forest; they began
to divide his clothes between themselves and found in his bag a lump
of pork fat. ‘In the nick of time,’ said one of them. ‘Let’s have a
bite!’ ‘How can you?’ the other cried in terror. ‘Have you forgotten
to-day’s Friday?’ So they refrained from eating. After having cut the
man’s throat they walked out of the forest confident that they were
pious fellows. These two are just the same. When they’ve paid for women
they go and imagine they’re painters and scholars....
“Listen, you two,” he said angrily and sharply. “Why do you go to those
places? Can’t you understand how horrible they are? Your medicine
tells you every one of these women dies prematurely from consumption
or something else; your arts tell you that she died morally still
earlier. Each of them dies because during her lifetime she accepts on
an average, let us say, five hundred men. Each of them is killed by
five hundred men, and you’re amongst the five hundred. Now if each of
you comes here and to places like this two hundred and fifty times in
his lifetime, then it means that between you you have killed one woman.
Can’t you understand that? Isn’t it horrible?”
“Ah, isn’t this awful, my God?”
“There, I knew it would end like this,” said the painter frowning. “We
oughtn’t to have had anything to do with this fool of a blockhead. I
suppose you think your head’s full of great thoughts and great ideas
now. Devil knows what they are, but they’re not ideas. You’re staring
at me now with hatred and disgust; but if you want my opinion you’d
better build twenty more of the houses than look like that. There’s
more vice in your look than in the whole street. Let’s clear out,
Volodya, damn him! He’s a fool. He’s a blockhead, and that’s all he is.”
“Human beings are always killing each other,” said the medico. “That is
immoral, of course. But philosophy won’t help you. Good-bye!”
The friends parted at Trubnoi Square and went their way. Left alone,
Vassiliev began to stride along the boulevard. He was frightened of the
dark, frightened of the snow, which fell to the earth in little flakes,
but seemed to long to cover the whole world; he was frightened of the
street-lamps, which glimmered faintly through the clouds of snow. An
inexplicable faint-hearted fear possessed his soul. Now and then people
passed him; but he gave a start and stepped aside. It seemed to him
that from everywhere there came and stared at him women, only women....
“It’s coming on,” he thought, “I’m going to have a fit.”